I keep wondering why my life turned out to be so hopeless and miserable. Did I do something in a past life and this is my punishment? Is it bad karma? But then karma has never made sense to me. If you murder someone, and karma decides you then need to be murdered to pay for that, it requires someone else to commit murder so you get your karma. The cycle would never end.

Is the New Age idea that we choose our lives before birth true? Do we choose everything that will happen to us in advance so we can learn something from it? Or is that just cope?

Are we just evolved pondslime who mutated into humans by chance and none of this means anything?

Why is life so incredibly awful for so many people?

  • woodenghost [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    4 months ago

    I’m sympathetic to the existentialist ideas. That in a meaningless, absurd world (Camus), the struggle for meaning, despite knowing that it’s absurd, can at least help us to live authentic(De Beauvoir) and free (Satre) lives. And maybe even make our own kind of meaning.

    Of course living authentically meant these philosophers were all active communists as was the person they admired the most for personifying existentialism better than them in her own life, Simon Weil.

    Also, have you tried writing about your life? It’s called narrative writing and might make you feel even worse (yay!). At least initially. But the idea is to own your live as an author, even if it’s challenging. It’s a kind of framing technique. You’d be a bit like an existential hero. Those always suffer, but now it’s your story and at least you alone get to decide, how you tell and interpret it.